@mahgister, I think you have stumbled onto an interesting problem with us humans. When we do not know what is going on we make stuff up. We mythologize. This may have been going on long before H. sapiens cropped up about 200,000 years ago. Zeus was a creative explanation for lightning. There have been millions of myths throughout our time on this planet all firmly taken as gospel in their day. Many had a very difficult death, like the earth is flat. New myths pop up on a daily basis if you care to watch the news.Thanks for you reply....
But reducing myths to only fancy is also a deception about ourself....
Myths are a fundamental expression of the creative imagination, and in this sense they are not "fictions" in the modern acceptation of the word...Imagination has 2 side: passive imagination this is illusion, dreaming, and going out of the reality...But creative and formative imagination is on the opposite side an access to reality and in this sense it is real...
Cassirer give the example of a curved line, that is a work of art for the artist, a mathematical conic section or the number line for a geometer, or the appearence of a beautiful feminine body for the lover, or an exact metaphor of the absolute infinite for a mystic, or a direct sign of the divine in the sky or in the sand or the confusion between a serpent and and cable in the dark room of imagination for many of us.... The curve is all that at the same times and way MORE.... Without imagination there is NO perception of reality....
And sometimes what we called myth, the oral transmission through millenia, convey and refer to real fact and phenomenon, interpreted in the past, but not reducible to "fiction" only....
Reality is not an outer "fact" or a set of facts.... This is one of the greatest illusion of modern man... Modern science and modern psychology enlightened us about that....
« What seems to exist, but does not exist by itself, is the real staircase that brings us to truth»-Anonymus Smith
«Do you also walk on water?»-Groucho Marx